Jesus Today . . .

JESUS AND THE WORLD

I have overcome the world.—Jn. 16:33

That our Lord would make such a statement as this in the very face of the cross can but stagger the mind of man. He is soon to be arrested and tried as a criminal. He is to die as a brigand, with none of the usual things that mark one’s life as even moderately successful. He was apparently penniless and upon his arrest his closest friends deserted him. And yet he says I have overcome the world.

It was the climatic statement of a weighty admonition: “In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. “

Malcolm Muggeridge, that salty old British cynic that became a Christian to the surprise of all his countrymen, pointed to this passage as the one that turned his life around. It was Muggeridge who became so disgusted with the false values of the college where he served that he resigned in protest, charging that all the students cared for was “booze and bed.” The world is both deceived and deceiving, he said, and what impressed him about Jesus was that he refused to let the world sell him a bill of goods. He overcame the world by not allowing the world to deceive him.

Jesus’ realism also impressed Muggeridge. The world is laden with troubles, Jesus is saying, and just as sure as you are in the world it is just that sure that you will have troubles. Whether diseases, tragedies, persecutions, heartaches, the troubles are there, for that is the way the world is. But that is OK; be of good cheer. I have overcome the world! Even in the face of the cross he had overcome, so there is cause only for joy, not despair. Muggeridge saw that this is what he had been looking for in this superficial world. He became a Christian, a follower of him who could speak of joy in the face of death and of victory in the face of a cruel cross.

One respected New Testament scholar has suggested that oftentimes when Jesus refers to “the world” he has reference to the Pharisees or to the Jewish ecclesiastical structure. He points out that this is what kosmos (world) means in the Greek, arrangement or structure. So when Jesus says to his own brothers who did not believe on him, “The world cannot hate you; but it hates me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil,” he is not referring to the rank and file masses but to the Jewish system. After all, Jesus did not cry out against the world generally but against the System. It was the System that hated him and finally destroyed him. And when he says “I am not of the world” he was referring to the difference between himself and the ecclesiasticism of his day, not to the social order generally.

This being the case, when he said “I have overcome the world,” he meant he had gained victory over the System that had well nigh destroyed the Jewish faith.

Whatever merits this interpretation has, it is evident that in many instances when Jesus talks about “the world” he is referring not to Pharisaism only but to the kind of world we all live in, the “order” over which Satan rules as “the prince of this world.” When he says “In the world you will have troubles,” he was referring to a world of drugs, crime, divorce, unemployment, abortion, inflation, as well as religious oppression. And when he said “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul” he was referring to all the allurements within our way of life, whether pleasure, things, fame, or fortune.

But when our Lord “came into this world” his confrontation was with the Pharisees, for they epitomized the values of “the world order” that sought to control the human spirit that the Father had made free. This is what Satan as the god of this world seeks to do, control man’s spirit and body. This is what the Pharisees were doing, as Jesus indicated: “You travel about on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.” They sought control over the people while Jesus was out to liberate them, thus the confrontation. But it was in essence a confrontation with the world, the system, “the order” that by its very nature stands opposed to God, who created mankind to be free.

This is what our world seeks to do to us, control every aspect of our lives, whether it be the way we think, the way we spend our money, or what we do with our spare time. The media, the government, the churches, the schools, the advertisers, and all the “experts” seek to determine our values and manage our lives. And there are many people, perhaps the majority, who are willing for others to do their thinking for them and to set their values and standards.

This is what it means to be “worldly” or “carnal”—captured by the values of “the System” and addicted by its allurements, which Jesus described as “choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life.” The man “of this world” is not the one who enjoys a glass of wine, but the one who has “drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality” and has “become rich by the wealth of her sensuality.” To be “worldly” is to be in a Babylonian captivity, captured by the world, its philosophies and its values.

This is what Muggeridge saw, even at an educational institution where booze and bed were more important than learning. He came to write about our “confetti world,” a world made unreal by all our game-playing and self-deception, a world that anesthetizes us against reality.

So when Jesus said “I have overcome the world” he was saying that the world did not and could not control him. While the world is powerfully deceitful with its false values, Jesus was not deceived in that he would riot buy the bill of goods that the world offered. The world presumed to have the upper hand in that it nailed him to a cross, but God turned its cruelty into mankind’s most glorious hour. In death there was victory, for God went on through the resurrection to make Jesus both Lord and Christ.

Our Lord was thus a free man of God even on the cross. It was his tormentors who were in bondage, for they allowed the obstructions of “the System” to keep them from seeing the Prince of Peace and the Lord of Glory. The Scriptures assure us that “it was because of ignorance that you did it,” but it was willful ignorance, which may be the greatest obstruction to freedom of all. Alas for the malady of not wanting to know! “Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks!,” Jesus warns, and we have those stumbling blocks all around us. We certainly are not immune to them because we are in the church.

The beauty of it all is that in any event, let come what may, we have the victory. Even in this world the victory is ours, for our Lord was victorious even in the world. So long as we are not of this world, deceived by its confetti, we have the victory and we can be of good cheer. Jesus faced even the cross with good cheer because of “the joy set before him.” He was a man with a destiny. He knew where he was going. In his high priestly prayer in Jn. 17 the Lord prayed to the Father “I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou hast given me to do” and went on to say “But now I come to Thee.” He was of good cheer because he had his values straight.

Fifteen times he refers to the world in that prayer in a way that shows he controlled it and that it did not control him. He was rather controlled by the Spirit within him. That too is our victory—the Editor